“Strange” might be one of the best ways to describe director
Wolfgang Petersen and Warner Bros.’ streamlined, mega-budget
refashioning of producer Irwin Allen’s 1972 capsized-ocean-liner flick The Poseidon Adventure. “Unsuccessful” might be another.

While
its reduction in handle was dictated from on high by marketing folks
(“One-word titles sell better internationally,” Petersen says he was
told), dropping the surname might be a good idea given the movie’s
rather stark depictions of mass disaster as mass entertainment in a
more on-edge, post-Sept. 11 world. (While its graphic nature isn’t
sustained, the movie’s PG-13 rating is borderline generous, considering
that dozens of people are engulfed in flame, and electrocutions and
tumbling corpses are seen en masse.) There’s air-quote adventure here,
but it’s hardly of the swash-buckling type. No, the interesting thing
about the spatially challenged Poseidon is how closely it hews,
emotionally speaking, to another genre: the slasher flick. Inexorably
on the rise, water comes off as a faceless stalker here, dispatching in
like fashion members of a thinly sketched ensemble with swift (sans
credits, the movie is just under an hour and a half) if generally less
dispassionate focus than any number of masked psychotic killers.

Emmy Rossum)
and her boyfriend Christian (Mike Vogel); Maggie James (Jacinda
Barrett) and her 9-year-old son Conor (Jimmy Bennett); galley waiter
Valentin (Freddy Rodriguez) and his stowaway companion Elena (Mia
Maestro); and Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss), a well-to-do, older
gay man despondent over the recent dissolution of his longtime
relationship.

Unlike some of its ’70s-era ancestors, Poseidon isn’t glib or
kitschy, but it is marked by some puzzling inconsistencies and lapses
in logic, which help spur feelings of tonal vertigo. As the ship’s
captain, Andre Braugher has to deliver a bizarre speech in which he
holds forth about “man emerging from the salty depths,” and intones
that the ancient marine deity Poseidon “made his home on the ocean
floor.” (Wow, nice foreshadowing.) Faced with questions from fellow
passengers after the catastrophe, meanwhile, Josh Lucas has to suffer
the indignity of huffishly barking the line, “Hey man, I work better on my own!” Umm… all right.

A total pro and a veteran with oceanic mayhem from his experience with both Das Boot and The Perfect Storm,
Petersen crafts just a few sequences that really stick in your craw.
The ship’s capsizing feels like watching a human pinball machine, with
uniformed stunt-people bouncing to and fro in a manner that may prove
unnerving to some. Narratively, the film also benefits greatly from
some fresh, breathlessly paced decisions with regards to whom to kill
off and when. In a time when it’s become increasingly easy to blindly
predict fatality based on character type and/or casting, Poseidon
presents a few head feints and at least some difficult choices/moments
for its charges, and this injects the proceedings with a few flashes of
tension largely missing in such fare. Poseidon’s pièce de
résistance, though, comes during a vertical shaft ascent, in which the
group, with water rising beneath them, must wiggle through a confined
space and somehow smash through a locked grate. The claustrophobia here
is palpable.

Damningly, though, Poseidon lacks almost any contextual
clarity. That the characters are almost all cardboard proxies is
forgivable, really, given that so much of what’s here as backstory is
awkward and/or awful. What the movie most vitally needs, then, is an
overview of its obstacle course, so that its headlong dash makes some
sense. Instead, characters make loose, of-the-moment proclamations with
regards to their course of escape, and rip conveniently placed
emergency diagrams off the wall when cornered, instantly translating
that into actionable intelligence. Through ostensibly driven by Johns’
naval experience and Ramsey’s disaster preparedness, none of this
passes the smell test, and we as the audience have no sense of
differentiation from one room to the next. We just know what Klaus
Badelt’s score tells us, which is that… more water is coming.

A slick tale of group-enabled heroics, Poseidon means to be,
in its own allegorical way, a celebration of humanity under duress,
presumably of the genus of the sort of quick thinking that helped save
lives during Hurricane Katrina and the attacks on the World Trade
Center. In actuality, though, it’s nothing more than a snuff film for a
higher income bracket. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 98 mins.)